Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  Eleanor Widener would probably have donned her famous multi-strand pearl necklace (valued at $250,000), since she and her husband and son Harry were hosting a dinner for Captain Smith in the Ritz Restaurant at seven-thirty that evening. They had invited their Philadelphia Main Line neighbors—the Thayers from Haverford and William Carter and his wife Lucile from Bryn Mawr. “Billy” Carter, thirty-six, was a keen horseman and polo player, and during the winter he and his family rented Rotherby Manor in Leicestershire so that he could take part in the many fox hunts held near Melton Mowbray. The Carters were returning to “Gwedna,” a large colonial-style mansion in Bryn Mawr, with their two children, three servants, two dogs, and a 25-horsepower Renault that was crated and stored in the forward hold. The ninth guest invited to the Wideners’ table was Archie Butt, who could be relied on to keep the conversation lively with witty stories and Washington gossip. For the evening, Archie likely selected his dress uniform, the same one he had worn for his audience with the pope, considering a show of gold lace to be appropriate for dining with the captain and the cream of Philadelphia society. Eleanor Widener would have conferred earlier with the restaurant’s manager, Signor Luigi Gatti, regarding the menu and placement for her guests in the elegant room, which, with its gilded Louis XVI décor, was remarkably similar in style to her own dining room at Lynnewood Hall.

  As many of the passengers dressed for dinner, they noticed that the rhythm of the ship’s engines had increased, an indication that extra boilers had been lit and that an even better mileage tally might be posted at noon tomorrow. At 7:15 Seaman Samuel Hemming, one of the ship’s lamp trimmers, arrived on the bridge to report to First Officer Murdoch that all the ship’s navigation lights had been lit. Murdoch was then acting as officer of the watch since Lightoller had gone to the officer’s mess for dinner. As Hemming was leaving, Murdoch called him back and asked him to close the fore scuttle hatch on the forecastle deck since there was a glow coming from it. “I want everything dark before the bridge,” Murdoch ordered in his Scottish-accented voice. With ice ahead, any ambient light could interfere with the lookouts’ ability to see clearly. The steamship Californian had advised at 6:30 p.m. that it had seen three large bergs five miles to the southwest, but this message wasn’t received by the Titanic’s Marconi Room. Junior operator Harold Bride was then writing up the day’s accounts and letting the equipment cool down after a very busy day. An hour later, when the transmitter was operating again, he intercepted the same message being sent from the Californian to the Antillian and delivered it to the bridge. By then Second Officer Lightoller had returned from dinner, and on his arrival, Murdoch had remarked on how the temperature had gone down four degrees, to thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, in the half hour that he had been gone. Within an hour it would drop to just above freezing.

  The passengers, too, were aware of the plunging temperatures, and according to Margaret Brown, some of the women wore warm wraps over their evening dresses to dinner. There was much discussion that evening of the ship’s increased speed and the possibility of arriving earlier in New York. There was also talk that icebergs lay ahead. Yet, remarkably, there was no thought of any pending danger. As May Futrelle later wrote:

  In the elegantly furnished drawing room [lounge], no premonitory shadow of death was present to cast a cold fear over the gaiety of the evening. It was a brilliant scene, women beautifully gowned, laughing and talking—the odor of flowers—ridiculous to think of danger. Why, it was just like being at some beautiful summer resort. There was not one chance in a million of an accident happening.

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  Eleanor Widener had reserved a table for nine in the Ritz Restaurant for a dinner in honor of Captain Smith. (photo credit 1.74)

  René Harris was hailed like a wounded hero as she entered the Ritz Restaurant on Harry’s arm. Bruce Ismay and Dr. O’Loughlin stood up to greet her from their table by the entrance, George and Eleanor Widener left their dinner guests to do the same, and the Duff Gordons were graciously sympathetic as the Harrises passed by them. Shortly after they had sat down with the Futrelles, Captain Smith, too, stopped by to compliment René on her spirit. “It made me feel that a broken arm was an asset,” she later noted.

  The Widener dinner party had gathered at seven-thirty in the restaurant’s reception room and was soon seated at a long table that extended into an alcove not far from the entrance. Mahala Douglas, who dined on the other side of the alcove with her husband, noticed through an opening in the carved paneling that the captain was seated at the head of the table, with Eleanor Widener to his right and Archie Butt on his left. She also remembered that the tables were decorated with pink roses and white daisies and that the food was superb: “caviar, lobster, quail from Egypt, plover’s eggs, and hothouse grapes and fresh peaches.” Mahala Dutton Douglas was the second wife of Walter Douglas, a Quaker Oats heir and mill owner from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who possessed a net worth equal to that of most of the millionaires at the Wideners’ table. Widowed in 1899, Douglas had married Mahala in 1906 and had recently retired at the age of fifty to enjoy life with her in a French Renaissance mansion they had built on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis. The couple were returning from a five-month European tour in search of furnishings for the lakeside home that they had dubbed Walden.

  Mahala had an artistic temperament and a flair for writing, and she would later describe how the evening passed quietly to the strains of Puccini and Tchaikovsky from the string trio outside in the reception room. She also maintained that “any claims of excessive gaiety” from the Widener table were “absolutely unfounded.” Eleanor Widener confirmed that the captain consumed no alcohol at dinner (as White Star regulations forbade), and Marian Thayer claimed that she heard no discussion at the table of icebergs being in the neighborhood since “Mr. Widener, Major Butt and I were engrossed in other subjects during the entire time of the dinner.” It seems, however, that it was mainly Archie Butt who engrossed Marian Thayer that night. In an emotive letter sent to President Taft one week after the disaster, she wrote:

  From the moment we met we never moved from each other for the rest of the evening. Never before have I come in such close contact immediately with anyone. He felt the same & we both marveled at the time at the strangeness of such a thing, for we both realized it while actually opening our innermost thoughts to each other. He told me much about his mother and their letters.… He spoke with deep enthusiasm of leaving his mark and memorial of truth to the world with those letters which should be published after he had gone.

  In case such instant intimacy could be misconstrued, Marian added: “He said I was just like his mother and opened his heart to me & it was as though we had known each other well for years.” She even goes on to suggest a past-life connection, a still-exotic notion for the time:

  It was the strangest sensation and felt as tho’ a veil was blown aside for those few hours eliminating distance between two who had known each other always well long, long before and had just found each other again—I believe it. Otherwise we could not have met just then and talked as we did.

  Marian Thayer and Archie Butt (photo credit 1.19) (photo credit 1.41)

  Observing this intent discussion from across the table, Eleanor Widener may have been less than thrilled that one of her prized guests was being monopolized. She had likely expected Archie to regale them with Washington anecdotes rather than leave her to engage the captain in dinner conversation. Yet she was evidently not marooned with the captain for long, since Marian Thayer reported that the meal was served very quickly and that at eight-thirty the party went out into the reception room for coffee, with Captain Smith departing by eight-forty-five. That an elaborate multi-coursed dinner should be completed in an hour seems surprising, and other guests in the restaurant that evening claimed that the Widener party actually lasted longer. Yet Marian Thayer’s timeline agrees with that of Second Officer Lightoller, who stated that the captain arrived on the bridge at eight-fifty-five. Smith’s firs
t words to Lightoller were about how cold it had become. Lightoller replied that it was only one degree above freezing and said that he had advised the ship’s carpenter to make sure that the liner’s water supply didn’t freeze.

  “There is not much wind,” the captain then observed.

  “No, it is a flat calm as a matter of fact,” Lightoller replied, and Smith repeated, “Yes, a flat calm.”

  “It is a pity there is not a breeze,” Lightoller said, meaning that there would be no waves breaking on the icebergs to make for easier sighting. “In any case,” he continued, “there will be a certain amount of reflected light from the bergs.” The captain agreed, noting that even with the blue side toward them, the white outline of the icebergs would still be visible. But he added that if it became at all hazy, they would have to slow down, and as he left the bridge at 9:20, said to Lightoller, “If in the slightest degree doubtful, let me know.”

  Back in the restaurant’s reception room, the rest of the Wideners’ guests were just finishing their coffee. Archie Butt, it seems, continued to be absorbed in conversation with Marian Thayer, and it was perhaps here, away from the table, that he confided to her that he “did not know how he was going to stand the rushing life he was returning to.” From the descriptions in Archie’s letters to Clara, “the rushing life” is an apt term for the fevered existence he led in Washington, where long days at the White House were followed by evenings of dinners, receptions, and cotillions. Marian Thayer goes on to describe to President Taft how Archie had agreed to meet her the following afternoon for a session where she would teach him “a method of control of the nerves through which I had just been with a noted Swiss doctor.” To acknowledge that one had been receiving treatment of this kind was a remarkably candid confession to make in 1912, particularly to the president of the United States. Mrs. Thayer then tells Taft that she thought “it would be a very wonderful thing for him [Archie] if he could just get hold of it [the nerve control technique] for he was very nervous … and we were going to work so hard over it the rest of the time on board.”

  “Nervous” was then a general term for mental distress and what afflicted Archie might today be diagnosed as an anxiety disorder or even depression. By making himself indispensable, and always available, to the president and to social Washington, Archie’s “rushing life” had brought him to the brink of nervous collapse. And despite his time away, he still suffered from black moods, as his cousin and her husband in London had observed. Archie knew that the pace during the coming fall election would be blistering, but he felt unable to leave his post. Doing so, he claimed, would seem disloyal and look as if he were abandoning Taft for Roosevelt. It was this quandary and his anxiety about returning home that kept him talking seriously with Marian Thayer for some time after the dinner.

  A jollier mood prevailed at the Harrises’ table, where May Futrelle recalled that her husband and Henry Harris discussed the latest American plays and “everybody was so merry. We were all filled with the joy of living.” There was an equally festive air two decks below in the Palm Room, where “our coterie” had assembled after dinner and the orchestra was playing requests. Helen Candee suggested a little Puccini while Hugh Woolner wanted to hear some Dvořák. Helen noticed that “the prettiest girl” asked for dance music and “clicked her satin heels and swayed her adolescent arms to the rhythm.” When the orchestra began packing up their instruments at nine-fifteen, Helen and her admirers were in no mood to end the party and so decided to walk up the grand staircase to the Café Parisien. As they sat down at a table for seven, Mrs. Candee saw that the only other occupied table was “made gay by the party of a president’s aid [sic],” indicating that by then Archie had put on a more social face and was entertaining a few of the guests he had neglected at dinner.

  May Futrelle (photo credit 1.3)

  “But how cold it is, how arctic!” said Helen as she drew close her scarf around her neck.

  “Something hot, then,” Woolner suggested to the waiter, who took orders for Scotch and lemon, hot whiskey and water, and warm lemonade. But the cold didn’t put a chill on their mood, as Helen recalled:

  How gay they were, these six. The talkative man [Gracie] told stories, the sensitive man [Kent] glowed and laughed, the two modest Irishmen [Colley and probably Smith] forgot to be suppressed, the facile Norseman [Björnström-Steffansson] cracked American jokes, the cosmopolitan Englishman [Woolner] expanded, and the lady felt divinely flattered to be in such company.

  Inside the restaurant, the Harrises and Futrelles lingered over dinner, as did Walter and Mahala Douglas. Another table was occupied by the Minahans, the Irish-American doctor from Wisconsin and his wife and sister who had boarded in Queenstown. The Duff Gordons had already left, with Lucile donning the squirrel coat she had worn to dinner on account of the cold. She and Cosmo had gone up one deck to the lounge, where they sat with a young New York couple named Edgar and Leila Meyer, who had also dined in the restaurant that evening. Lucile was aware that twenty-five-year-old Leila was the daughter of Andrew Saks, the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue, who had died while dining at Sherry’s on April 8. The Meyers had received a telegram in Paris the next day and had quickly booked passage home on the Titanic for the tenth. While chatting with them, Lucile brought out her autograph book, which was a “confessions” book, a then-popular novelty with pages where friends could write in appropriate comments about themselves under such headings as “Likes,” “Abominations,” and even “Madnesses.” Edgar Meyer, who was twenty-eight, took Lucile’s book, and when he came to “Madnesses,” laughed and wrote, “I have only one—to live”—a sad irony given that only hours remained to him.

  Upon leaving the restaurant, the Harrises decided to stop in the smoking room for an after-dinner cigarette while the Futrelles opted for a walk on deck since Jacques had a slight headache. René was likely the only woman to “infest” the smoking room that night—to use Frank Millet’s term. Frank himself was there, enjoying a round of cards with Clarence Moore. There had been only the two of them at their table in the dining saloon that evening since Archie was dining upstairs. The meal had been the most gala of the voyage so far, with a menu card featuring “Oysters à la Russe,” “Filets Mignons Lili,” “Calvados-Glazed Roast Duckling,” and “Chocolate Painted Eclairs” among its eleven courses. Arrangements of hothouse grapes and other fresh fruits decorated the tables, and two-year-old Loraine Allison had been brought to the table her parents shared with Arthur Peuchen and Harry Molson so she could see how beautiful it was.

  Baskets of fruit had adorned the tables in the second-class dining saloon as well, and after dinner a group of about a hundred passengers had taken part in a hymn sing around the piano. In third class the main meal, as usual, had been served at midday followed by a hearty English savory tea in the late afternoon. Afterward, in the spartanly furnished third-class “general room,” an informal party had begun with music provided by the upright piano and the passengers’ own instruments. It’s unlikely there was much dancing, however, given that the room’s large double-backed benches left little open floor space and it was, after all, the Sabbath. At one point a rat was sighted and several young men chased it to squeals from the women. At ten o’clock the stewards turned out the lights in the general room and the “smoke room” next door, and passengers dispersed to their berths in the bow and stern, while a few may have sought dark spaces on the well deck for romantic encounters.

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  Clarence Moore (top) and Frank Millet were among those in the first-class smoking room on Sunday night. (photo credit 1.2)

  At this time on the bridge, Second Officer Lightoller was preparing to turn over the watch to First Officer Murdoch. Lightoller recapped for Murdoch his earlier conversation with the captain and also told him that he had sent orders up to the crow’s nest for the lookouts to keep a sharp eye for small pieces of ice and low-lying bergs known as “growlers.” This message had just be
en passed on to lookouts Fred Fleet and Reginald Lee, who were beginning their two-hour shift. That the crow’s nest binoculars still had not been found did not seem to be of pressing concern. And another ice warning message that came into the Marconi Room at about nine-forty may not have struck operator Jack Phillips as being terribly pressing either. He had already delivered several ice messages to the bridge, and this one from the Mesaba, describing “heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs, also field ice,” likely didn’t seem very different from the others. He may have set it aside, as he had just made contact with the wireless station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, and was busily transmitting passenger messages. Second Officer Lightoller would later claim that this all-important message, indicating that not just random icebergs but a huge ice field lay directly ahead of the Titanic, went undelivered. As Lightoller left the bridge, he mentioned to Murdoch that he estimated they should reach the ice at around eleven o’clock.

  Norris Williams and his father had been out walking on deck after dinner, but even in their fur coats they found it too chilly and so went inside to the smoking room. There they joined a group of men that included John B. Thayer and Archie Butt, and very soon the cold weather and the possibility of icebergs ahead came up for discussion. Charles Williams then related the story of how he had been aboard a ship in 1879 called the Arizona when it had struck an iceberg. The collision knocked a hole in the Arizona’s forward bow but the crew and passengers had taken bales of cotton from the ship’s cargo hold and plugged the leaking bulkhead so that the ship was able make it into St. John’s, Newfoundland, thirty-six hours later.

  At around the same time, another shipwreck anecdote was being related at a table in the Palm Room to John and Marian Thayer’s teenaged son, Jack. With his parents dining upstairs at the Wideners’ party, Jack had eaten alone in the dining saloon and then gone into the Palm Room. As he searched for a free table, a young American named Milton Long waved him over. The two struck up a conversation and the twenty-nine-year-old Long, a judge’s son from Springfield, Massachusetts, began regaling Thayer with stories of his travels. One of the most impressive of his adventures had occurred in Alaska, where he was on board a small steamer that ran aground on an offshore reef. As the ship was tipping over, Long managed to jump onto some shoals and then made his way from one rock to another until he reached shore with only wet feet.